Get the last known location

Using the Google Play services location APIs, your app can request the last
known location of the user's device. In most cases, you are interested in the
user's current location, which is usually equivalent to the last known
location of the device.

Specifically, use the
fused
location provider to retrieve the device's last known location. The fused
location provider is one of the location APIs in Google Play services. It
manages the underlying location technology and provides a simple API so that
you can specify requirements at a high level, like high accuracy or low power.
It also optimizes the device's use of battery power.

Note: On Android 8.0 (API level 26) and higher,
if an app is running in the background when it requests the current location,
then the device calculates the location only a few times each hour. To learn
how to adapt your app to these calculation limits, see
Background
Location Limits.

This lesson shows you how to make a single request for the location of a
device using the
getLastLocation()
method in the fused location provider.

Set up Google Play services

To access the fused location provider, your app's development project must
include Google Play services. Download and install the Google Play services
component via the SDK
Manager and add the library to your project. For details, see the guide to
Setting Up Google Play
Services.

Specify app permissions

Apps that use location services must request location permissions. Android
offers two location permissions:
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION
and
ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION.
The permission you choose determines the accuracy of the location returned by
the API. If you specify
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION,
the API returns a location with an accuracy approximately equivalent to a city
block.

This lesson requires only coarse location. Request this permission with the
uses-permission element in your app manifest, as the following code
snippet shows:

Get the last known location

Once you have created the Location Services client
you can get the last known location of a user's device. When your app is
connected to these you can use the fused location provider's
getLastLocation()
method to retrieve the device location. The precision of the location returned
by this call is determined by the permission setting you put in your app
manifest, as described in the Specify App
Permissions section of this document.

To request the last known location, call the
getLastLocation()
method. The following code snippet illustrates the request and a simple handling of the
response:

Kotlin

fusedLocationClient.lastLocation
.addOnSuccessListener { location : Location? ->
// Got last known location. In some rare situations this can be null.
}

The
getLastLocation()
method returns a Task
that you can use to get a
Location
object with the latitude and longitude coordinates of a
geographic location. The location object may be null in the
following situations:

Location is turned off in the device settings. The result could be
null even if the last location was previously retrieved because
disabling location also clears the cache.

The device never recorded its location, which could be the case of a new
device or a device that has been restored to factory settings.

Google Play services on the device has restarted, and there is no active
Fused Location Provider client that has requested location after the
services restarted. To avoid this situation you can create a new client and
request location updates yourself. For more information, see Receiving Location
Updates.

The next lesson,
Changing Location Settings, shows
you how to detect the current location settings, and prompt the user to
change settings as appropriate for your app's requirements.